Colorado teacher’s rare T. Rex find on display at Denver Museum of Nature & Science

Most teachers come home from summer break with a tan and a pile of vacation photos. Kent Hups came home with T. rex footprints. Hups teaches science at Northglenn High School. While exploring the North Dakota Badlands in 2025, he found what researchers are calling the first reported adult Tyrannosaurus rex trackway, a trail of footprints left by a full-grown T. rex about 67 million years ago. Now part of it is at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

Hups wasn’t on a big dinosaur dig when he found it. “You don’t wake up that morning and go I think I’m going to find a T-rex trackway,” he told CBS Colorado. He’s a longtime museum volunteer and research associate, and his advice for future fossil hunters is the kind every science teacher gives: “You never find anything sitting at home. You never find anything looking on your phone. You find things when you go out.” Kids, that’s your excuse to put down the tablet.

The museum showed off three of the tracks outside on Wednesday, still wrapped in their thick plaster field jackets. Scientists have found T. rex bones for more than a century, but footprints from an adult walking along are much rarer. These tracks capture a T. rex out for a stroll, not just the bones it left behind.

Want to stand in a T. rex’s footsteps? Part of the trackway goes on display at the museum starting Friday, Oct. 30, as part of the “Discovering Teen Rex” exhibit, and it’ll stay through the end of the year. That works out nicely, since the museum’s Teen Rex was also found by fossil hunters from Colorado. Check the museum’s website for hours and tickets before you go.